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Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
449: Cybersecurity and the New CMO Profile with Brian Goldfarb, CMO of SolarWinds
00:41:41
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- [00:02]
Kristen
What is Dax, Are you tracking all.
- [00:04]
Brian Goldfarb
Our cars on Carvana Value Tracker on all our devices? Yes, Kristen, yes, I am.
- [00:09]
Kristen
Well, I've been looking for my phone for.
- [00:10]
Brian Goldfarb
In Dax's domain we see all. So we always know what our cars are worth. All of them? All of them. Value surge trucks up 3.9%.
- [00:20]
Kristen
That's a great offer.
- [00:21]
Brian Goldfarb
I know. Sell. Sell. Track your car's value with Carvana Value Tracker today.
- [00:30]
Alan Hart
Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here.
- [00:32]
Kristen
It's a new year and you know what that means.
- [00:34]
Alan Hart
No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try.
- [00:38]
Kristen
And do a little bit better than.
- [00:39]
Alan Hart
We did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise.
- [00:44]
Kristen
The price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
- [01:06]
Brian Goldfarb
For all of us, it's about predicting where the consumer is going and getting half of it right. One of the things we want to do is create ads that don't suck. Embracing change creates great possibility.
- [01:22]
Alan Hart
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today. Today on the show I've got Brian Goldfarb. He's the chief Marketing Officer at SolarWinds. Brian brings over 20 years of experience driving growth at some of the world's largest and most respected technology companies, such as Tenable, Splunk, Salesforce.com and Google. On the show today, we talk about SolarWinds, the types of solutions they provide. A cyber security event that was pretty horrible for the company and for industry overall and how they came back from that and were able to recover. They talk about what marketing looks like at SolarWinds and the role of the CMO and how that shifted changed and what we should be thinking about as it relates to the role itself. That and much more with Brian Goldfarb. Brian, welcome to the show.
- [02:20]
Brian Goldfarb
Thanks. Really good to be here. Yeah, super excited.
- [02:22]
Alan Hart
Yeah. I'm looking forward to hearing about Solar Winds. But before we get there, I hear you've had this brush with fame early in life on a game show. I have to hear more that you.
- [02:35]
Brian Goldfarb
Clearly did your deep intelligence here. Jeez. Yes, it's true. When I was a child, 400 years ago, I was on a game show. Mark Summers was the host. He was. He was the Nickelodeon Bane.
- [02:52]
Alan Hart
Oh, yeah, I know, the slime show. I can't remember the name of it.
- [02:56]
Brian Goldfarb
I wasn't on the slime show. I was on a. It was a show called Pick youk Brain. It lasted like one season, maybe two. And they brought in fifth graders and the game show trivia, you know, with stupid people tricks and things. But I did have a brush with Bay. I had a brush with fans failure more than anything. Not just fame where I had a chance to win. I think a lifetime supply of Hershey chocolate or something amazing. Actually. I think it was a scholarship. That would have been pretty awesome. And I totally failed the question for the audience. You can check your own knowledge. Can you beat a fifth grader? What is the largest grade great lake?
- [03:43]
Alan Hart
I only know this because I think you might have mentioned this question to me before. Superior, Yes.
- [03:50]
Brian Goldfarb
I said Michigan, which is the better lake? But it's not the biggest.
- [03:54]
Alan Hart
I like it. Quality over quantity.
- [03:57]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah. Unfortunately the judges didn't see it that way and I lost the Unser. So it is what it is. But yeah, it was a fun start to my very short TV career.
- [04:07]
Alan Hart
I love it from, from a early TV career to now being the chief marketing officer at SolarWind. Where did you get your kind of professional start and what were some of the highlights along the way?
- [04:18]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah, you could tell my trivia background is what got me to where I am. I started my career began in the early days of the Internet, like working for a Internet service provider. I was doing dial up PPP Internet, which I think most people don't even know what the heck that is anymore. Or like a modem used to make squawking noises. I was helping do tech support and sysadminy stuff back in the day and kind of bridged into being a web developer in the call it 96ish timeframe and was building early websites on the Internet, which is really cool, and writing code when you didn't have to be very good at it because no one was. And that's where I began. Then I took a bit of a right turn where I went to college. They're like, everyone should be an investment banker. I was like, okay, cool, I can do that. So I went and worked on Wall Street a little bit and didn't love that too much and stumbled into a job doing product management at Microsoft, which we would call product marketing today. Although I didn't know that at the time. I was just insulted they didn't want me to be an engineer. And that was my first real marketing job. Kind of just been rolling through that the 10 years at Microsoft doing all kinds of cool things. Mostly in the developer space. So there was some alignment with my technical background and I was. I launched Google Cloud platform, which everyone knows today. But when I started at Google it didn't exist, which was neat. I remember doing the brand exploration for the gear and I'll take that as a claim to fame. There's a good Kubernetes story in there too. And then I've worked at some other companies you may have heard of. I worked at Salesforce, ran platform marketing there. I was the CMO at Splunk, the operations and cybersecurity space. I was CMO at Tenable, another cybersecurity company. So I've worked at a couple startups. So it's been varied over a long time and now been in this seat for. I was counting it in weeks, but the reality is almost a year. I'll acknowledge, I'll round forward now. It's been awesome.
- [06:30]
Alan Hart
I love it. I have to ask because Kubernetes is a funny word. You said there's a story there.
- [06:37]
Brian Goldfarb
The story is not about the naming. The naming was. There was a guy. Joe beta and Craig McClucky were the original creators of Kubernetes, which was really the productization of Org, which was the technology that ran Google's data centers. And how their model worked, which was a lot, was basically containerization before anyone knew a containerization. Containerization was and. And they called it Brunetti. But the story is the logo. So if you look at the logo, it's the little captain's wheel, like an old sailing ship captain's wheel. But in Google, the brand identity used the gear, which was a hexagon and products got hexagons. It was always a big deal. I was the arbiter of the marketing leader of the hexagon and they came to me and I'm super smart. Like we have this open source thing, it's going to be a big deal. We should get a hexagon. And I was like, no. And so despite me, which you can, they'll say this. There's recordings on the Internet where they say this. So unfortunately it's true forever. I can't even lie about it anymore. They created a seven sided hexagon, which is why the Kubernetes logo is the seven sided thing, because it wasn't a hexagon and therefore they didn't need my approval. And it did end up becoming a big deal and I was totally wrong and it shouldn't have had a hexagon and I acknowledge that. But look, in the spirit of failure. Like that's number two.
- [08:03]
Alan Hart
Yeah. Despite maybe getting the Great Lakes question wrong and despite maybe denying a hexagon or maybe a hexagon was warranted, you've done pretty well.
- [08:13]
Brian Goldfarb
You could argue the fact that it's not a hexagon worked in their favor because then it was outside of the portfolio and everyone used it. Now that's true. Now those stories are lore, which makes it super fun.
- [08:24]
Alan Hart
I love it. Love it. Like you said, you are the CMO now at SolarWinds. Let's talk a little bit about SolarWinds. How do I think about the company? What's the scope of the company itself, the solutions you guys provide, et cetera?
- [08:38]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah, SolarWinds is an amazing company. 25 years old, there aren't that many of those around with that kind of legacy and kind of been a pillar of the monitoring and IT operations space. Started solving problems for everyday sysadmin which I used to be in the same time period actually once came a little after I was doing that would have been useful frankly at the time and got it start providing useful tools that help system administrator and IT people solve real problems around networking and performance and monitoring and understanding their environments and their estates. And it's built quite an impressive portfolio based on that foundation over the last two and a half decades. And so the way to think about the company today in modern parlance is we think of ourselves as providing monitoring and observability solutions for IT professionals. We also do service management and service desk and we believe that the concept of finding problems and fixing problems are really one. And so combining observability solutions and service desk solutions and over time incident response into one common platform is the future of this market. And so taking all of that history and our relationship with hundreds of thousands of real practitioner users and bridging that to the future and doing that both on prem which was our foundation, given it was a long time ago and the cloud didn't really exist to the cloud using on premises and self and SaaS products.
- [10:18]
Alan Hart
Lynn, you're in almost every corporation. It feels, I don't know if if your market penetration is that high, but it feels like you're everywhere that high.
- [10:27]
Brian Goldfarb
We're like 80, 80 plus percent of the Fortune 500. We have hundreds of thousands of customers. There's. You typically find SolarWinds somewhere inside of a company and that sometimes that's a strategic platform that they've made huge bets on and there's great companies we've done that with and then sometimes it's a guy or some person in the IT department that just had a problem to solve. And SolarWinds was the best, most effective way to do that. And that gives us quite a wide range of interacting with our customers.
- [11:01]
Alan Hart
Now for some people listening to this, they may say, wait, I know that name of this company. And there was this cyber event.
- [11:09]
Brian Goldfarb
Oh, I thought you were going to say we were clean energy company. I get that. Oh, you work in clean tech. I'm like, you're definitely not in my icp.
- [11:17]
Alan Hart
No windmills. No windmills, yeah.
- [11:19]
Brian Goldfarb
Oh, do you do solar energy? No, but you're not buying my software, so I don't care. Actually, it's a fascinating case study in selecting out qualifying questions and ICP identification. But yes, a lot of people also know us based on a cybersecurity incident that occurred against the company, which is where we're at, called Sunburst.
- [11:41]
Alan Hart
And to go through something like that's terrible regardless of what kind of company you are. But how do you as like a marketing leader, as a company, how do you think about recovering from an event like that?
- [11:53]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah, it's super terrible and it was terrible timing. Highly sophisticated, unforeseeable attack by a nation state actor which is effectively unpreventable by anyone using never before seen novel techniques in a supply chain attack that now has become more prevalent and I think the world's desensitized to it. But at a moment where they were targeting multiple software companies, I think we get a lot of credit. From where I sit, it's terrible. Established that we get a lot of credit for how we handled it. Super transparent, super customer focused, really, I think led the industry and what it looks like to do collaboration and really have pushed public private cooperation which if you look at the stories that people tell now many years later, like that is, that's front and center. And I think we get credit for pioneering what that could and should look like in a lot of ways. And our customers you talk about, we're everywhere. We were blessed with 98% retention rate because our customers loved our software, they loved who we were, we had those relationships and helped us kind of work through that part of the journey. And so when you take the. What does that mean now? Right. I like to say get beyond the breach. And I think we're beyond the breach in a lot of ways. Whereas a marketer, it's. How do you get people thinking about the company where that isn't the first thing they say or isn't the first thing they see because the Google algorithm is awful and there's a lot of ink unfortunately on those things.
- [13:26]
Alan Hart
Right.
- [13:26]
Brian Goldfarb
And so there's a big part of my job is how do you reimagine who we are as a next generation company where that isn't part of the story? How do you establish that not only in our hearts and I think at the company level we're there, but with our customers hearts and minds. And then how do you do that in the ways people discover things. Right. For people that know us, which is lots, there's not a lot to talk about. People who don't know us like intimately, there's a lot to talk about. And I think that's the hardest challenge we have.
- [14:02]
Alan Hart
It's pretty amazing. We. I don't know if we in marketing think about this, but you always hear if you, depending on what podcast you listen to, about how to drive your performance to higher levels. Right. You hear the analogy of elite performers. It's not about the performance, it's the recovery in between the performances. Right. And it sounds like you guys have gone through that exact scenario of like, how do we recover the fa, like fast, how do we recover? How do we get to the next level of our performance, not focused on what's happened behind us.
- [14:37]
Brian Goldfarb
So yeah, yeah, it's right. Do you drink electrolytes? How fast the recovery time? Yeah, I don't know how much of that's age driven, but. No, it's true. Right. I think it really does get difficult for any organization when there's a negative event period. Right. Earned or otherwise. And as a marketer, what gets interesting and one of the reasons I joined is the opportunity to be able to help with that next step because no one deserves, everyone deserves those next moments. Like I said, our customer base stuck with us. They're super happy. So it's how do you convince and engage with the rest and help them see the same things? And I think that's like fundamentally a super exciting opportunity.
- [15:26]
Alan Hart
Love it. Love it. Well, what does marketing look like at SolarWinds you talked about, for those that don't know you, there's a lot to know. So how do you structure marketing in.
- [15:36]
Brian Goldfarb
Itself for our fellow marketeers? Every good new CMO I came in, I did a huge reorder because that's what you do. I didn't change the colors though. They did that before I arrived. That was good. I didn't have to go down that route. They changed the orange to make it awesome, which is where it's really good. But we run, I run a Fairly traditional functionalized marketing organization. I believe pretty deeply that as a discipline we do best when we can hire experts in domains and let them do what they do great and then manage the complexities of a matrix. So corporate marketing, demand generation, product marketing strategy and ops or mops like I think most people would do it. I think the one thing we have that would be unusual is we have a marketing engineering organization. We do a lot of IT work out of marketing for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so good. And have a pretty large investment in technology resources. So the chief marketing technology officer hat in a lot of ways I wear in the Revtech staff and it's just been, it was, it's a timing statement more than anything. Just the company grew up before a lot of the tech stack existed and we built a lot of things ourselves, which is good and bad. But that's how we structure it today or since we made the changes in the summer and it's been really positive.
- [16:54]
Alan Hart
I love it. You just, you hit on something we should talk about which is like this evolving role of the CMO feels for some time now we've talked about roles going our way. Then they come back like, where's your head? What do you think about the CMO role and what should it really be focused on?
- [17:11]
Brian Goldfarb
Writers need to stay in business, right? Black is the new orange. Orange is the new black. It's gotta constantly change. I think the CMTO concept was hot in like the late like 2015, 16, 17, 18 timeframe, then disappeared. I do see marketeers, marketing leaders being forced to be technology leaders. I don't think that's different. I think the idea of trying to say it's a thing, I think everyone realizes it's a thing. And so maybe the frame, the terminology is no longer necessary, but the role's changed a lot. If you think about, and I don't know, I think you work with CMOs and talk to CMOs all the time. But if you look at the profiles of the people that get hired, and I talk about this a lot when I mentor and I work with people who are like, I want to be a CMO and I always say it's the worst job, you don't want it, try something else. We, when they, once they get past that gate, they're like, no, I really do, it's great, okay, who hires, what's the profile of the modern cmo? And if you look back in time, the profile used to be very creative, right brained, almost advertising oriented people. And that applied to B2C and B2B. I think it was universal right brand first thinkers and I think that's super important still. But the profile of CMOs these days tend to be a lot more demand gen which you could argue is left brain math or product marketing which is more technical and storytelling oriented. And I think that reflects the evolving state of the cmo. I think there's good things in there and there's bad things in there that we can probably unpack back today.
- [18:59]
Kristen
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- [19:35]
Alan Hart
Raise prices due to inflation.
- [19:37]
Kristen
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- [19:44]
Alan Hart
You insane Hollywood? So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month.
- [19:50]
Kristen
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- [19:59]
Brian Goldfarb
Details?
- [20:03]
Alan Hart
Yeah, talk to me a little bit about how you think about how do those things work together, right? Like when they come together you've got to create demand, but you've also got to have a good story to tell.
- [20:13]
Brian Goldfarb
Those are highly relate it gets bad. I think things break when the CMO function gets rotated underneath the CRO function and it just becomes a discipline of sales because it breaks the promise. The promise of marketing is that we represent the customer over its lifetime in the future. And we don't have a quarterly boat anchor that sales teams do or monthly or daily or whatever your close is. And when you rotate it over there, I think it breaks that promise, it breaks trust and it changes the dynamic dramatically. So I'm pretty against that view. And there's lots of reasons like seat at the table influence Representing the customer to the C suite, having that level of influence. But most importantly to me, it's the promise to the customer that you'll think about them beyond the transaction. And that's so important in a modern SaaS world. I say all the time when you sell something to someone today, you've actually only just earned the right to start selling as opposed to in the old world where when you sold something to someone you earned the right to never talk to them again. And I that hasn't. That's not good. And so the modern way really is marketing customer, you can say just customer centric, CX centric, et cetera. And then I think as an independent entity you get sometimes overly aligned to show me the math. This is the number, prove the pipeline, show me the efficacy and all that's super important. And we're so lucky from your digital side of the world, this right. We have access to an incredible amount of information and metrics and data that we never had before. So we made it, made it up. What's 50% of it works? We just don't know which half that's not true anymore. We actually have a lot more data that tells us 70% of it works. And we sometimes know which part works way better. But you get overly aligned to that Pareto optimization and you forget that the marginal return actually goes away if you forget to invest in brand and forget to invest in stories. And that's where I see things breaking a lot these days because we're in a. The economic climate sucks, everyone's contractionary, everyone's thinking about where they can drive profit and ebit. And so it's very easy to say, oh, I can't spend on awareness and engagement or community. And I actually think there's no way to prove this. There probably is a way to prove it, but it's too expensive. You wouldn't want to pay to prove it. You have to like believe in the religion. Those things become critical at driving high value outcomes with demand.
- [22:48]
Alan Hart
Do you feel like you talked about you've got your technology component of your job as well? Do you feel like that's a, a secret weapon helping you bridge these things because you've got a little bit more control over your stack?
- [23:01]
Brian Goldfarb
Having control over the stack is nice because control is a great thing. No one doesn't like that.
- [23:07]
Alan Hart
That's right.
- [23:08]
Brian Goldfarb
But I don't think of it as a secret weapon. I think of it as a table stake situation. If you're not leaning into modern marketing technology concepts and infrastructure at this Point, you're dead. And so it's not a secret weapon. I just think it's basic.
- [23:26]
Alan Hart
Yeah, okay, fair enough. Fair enough. One of the things you said to me the last time we were talking was you talked about this concept of a lack of novelty is not a bad thing. And I'd love for you to tell me what. Yeah, I'd love you to tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that as it relates to marketing in particular.
- [23:44]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah, yeah, maybe I'm like an outlier, but everyone you get stuck in this I need new things world. I think marketing is a victim of this. Oh, I built this thing and I shipped it yesterday, so now I need a new thing. No, actually you need to do the old thing until you're so bored of it and then keep doing it. And so there's this need for new that sometimes doesn't actually do justice to the investments you make. So I think forgetting that the creation of a thing is not important, that's one aspect to it in the context of the novelty piece. Look, a lot of organizations, SolarWinds is, was. Is guilty of this too, sometimes thinks they need to invent I say new physics in order to solve problems, and I think that's false. The vast majority, and there are new types of problems that do require novel outcomes, novel thinking, novel approaches, new ideas. But the vast majority of business problems that we face are not novel. They do not require new physics. They do not require tons of ingenuity. They require focus, discipline, and execution. And I think you'll hear that there's lots of euphemisms like, oh, it's not about the idea, it's about the execution. That's true. Companies succeed with execution, not necessarily with ideas. Ideas are cheap. Whatever. There's a lot of things we can say, but that's what I mean when I think having lack of novelty is not bad. Standing on the shoulders of giants. There are lots of art. You're a startup. Hey, you're one of our audience. Is a startup. Cmo. There's five of you. You don't need to invent anything because Google and Microsoft and Salesforce and Oracle and HubSpot, all these big companies, they did all the hard work. So you can just copy or at least copy a version of what they think. Now you can. So there's just things you can learn from others and apply pattern, match and connect. It's not like one to one, but you don't need to create a new world. That's what I mean by that.
- [25:44]
Alan Hart
Yeah. Yeah, it sounds. Get the basics right, focus on execution. Don't chase shiny pennies.
- [25:52]
Brian Goldfarb
Oh, man. Chasing shiny objects and bright shiny object syndrome for sure. Every CEO has that disease and we fight it for sure. And it's important because again, if you get bored of something too soon, you've wasted a lot of investment. It costs a lot of money to build something. And when you're like, oh, I saw that once, I'm like, yeah, you saw it, but did anybody else see it? How many customers do you have? What's the world look like? How long should that run be in market? The cost of change of a campaign or a tagline or an asset is quite high. And so there's a lot of that. It also bridges sometimes into this world of category creation. Right. Everyone's, I'm going to go create my new category. There's good research and thinking that in some market, winner take all markets or oligarchy markets, that's really important. But most people don't have that luxury. I think they end up chasing a ghost. That's not possible. So how do you design an existing category to fit in for your niche? How do you go and architect into something that already exists or bridge it?
- [26:51]
Alan Hart
No, it makes sense. It makes sense. A couple of things stand out that are tangentially related to what you're talking about. One is on the advertising front, I think there's a group out there, a friend of mine works at System One, they test advertising and they have yet to find wear out of ads. Like, we get tired of them as marketers and so we want to create new ones. But very rarely has an ad actually ever wore out.
- [27:17]
Brian Goldfarb
So certainly not in a timeframe that like is human based. Like 365 days. Like no way are you on year three of the ad. Like maybe.
- [27:25]
Alan Hart
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [27:27]
Brian Goldfarb
That's. But that's great to hear. That data, your buddy has that data on the advertising side because it validates, I guess, something that I just intuitively believe. I don't have data, but I know and I guess there's data. Like I'll run something in market and I'll talk to someone and say, did you see this cool thing we did? And they're like, what are you talking about? Which happens like 99% of the time. But your salesperson or your employees, like, God, I am so sick of seeing the same thing. But you're looking for, for it. You're not the right audience, you're not the right, you shouldn't get a vote.
- [28:00]
Alan Hart
Right?
- [28:00]
Brian Goldfarb
You don't your vote is you don't have the right perspective so you shouldn't get a vote. And I do think that can drive really bad behavior where if you want a message to land and market, you have to be patient. IBM was like the best at this back in the day. They would run these campaigns for eight years. Jesus. Their AI campaign, the Watson campaign's like 20 years in. They have the E campaign. They were so good at being hyper commit for better and for worse. Sometimes hyper committed to a concept and run it for super long period of time. I remember doing a case study on them like 2003, 2004, how great they were at that. And I think Apple's good at this now they tune things but they haven't changed much.
- [28:49]
Alan Hart
No, not much at all actually for a long time.
- [28:53]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah, that's the consumer space in enterprise software. It's different but not all that different. Right. You're targeting people, you're trying to get mind share and we get bored of our message and then be like why isn't it working? It's only been in market for two weeks. Why it's not working?
- [29:07]
Alan Hart
Because of that fact alone. Yeah, exactly.
- [29:10]
Brian Goldfarb
Ask me in two years and no one's paying. And that's where things start to break apart. That's why this CRO thing show me a marketing function that's living and dying by demand gen only that can survive long enough to prove out a thesis that's customer oriented in the long running they can't. And so I think there's just a lot of bad marketing out there right now.
- [29:28]
Alan Hart
Yeah, no, I would probably, I would agree with you. I would agree with you. I've enjoyed getting to know your perspective on marketing. Want to turn the table a little bit and we know you had an early brush with fame.
- [29:41]
Brian Goldfarb
Yes.
- [29:42]
Alan Hart
But my question I love to ask everyone that comes on the show is has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?
- [29:51]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah, obviously failing on that game show is totally defined me. I think there's. This is. You even prepped me for this question. I thought about it and it's a tough one for sure. I think, look, I think there's experience like work experience, like I have life experiences that have defined who I am today. When you're like being bullied as a kid or different ways of generating thick skin. But that's. I think we all deal with those different things that are defining in the work context. One of the things that has defined my journey for me was actually changing jobs I worked at Microsoft for a long time, 10 years. And then I went to work at Google, which at the time, those two companies were about as different as they could possibly be. And I didn't appreciate at all at the time that just because I knew how to do something at some company, that IQ and conviction and history would all translate to a different environment. It was like I could jump on Earth, but I went to Mars and I could no longer jump. Even though it's the same kinetic mechanics. I wish. I think that's been really defining once I realized that bug, because I screwed it up real bad at the beginning. You thought you knew everything. You didn't bring the right humility. You didn't know how to ask questions. You're like, yeah, I know how to do that. And you're like, no, actually you don't here. And I think a lot of people get to. And this is like a duration problem. Like the switching jobs help. What is the. What helps? You can always learn more context, but can you learn more culture in an organization? I actually would. I actually believe the answer is no. Culture learning caps. Well, before context learning caps, the big companies context learning can be infinite, but culture learning doesn't really change. You learn how to operate in an environment. And so that's been really defining for me. And I've had a lot of jobs. My wife likes to joke you can't keep a job, but it helps learn how to be effective faster and how to be more adaptable into a new environment. I was literally talking to an employee today who was leaving and been at the company for 12 years. Amazing run. And I gave him the advice. I'm like, look, you know how to fly a Boeing aircraft. You're going to go fly a Airbus aircraft. It's still an airplane, but you actually have no idea how to fly. And so take the time, be patient and humble and learn. Even though you know how to fly, the mechanics are different. And that's going to be a huge impact. That to me is super defining in my work career and how I manage and how I lead and how I think today.
- [32:30]
Alan Hart
I love it. What advice would you give your younger self if you're starting all over again?
- [32:35]
Brian Goldfarb
Oh, I would tell my younger self you're not that busy, and just shut up and realize that. I don't know. You always go through this. I'm so busy. How many times have you said that to yourself? And then two years later you're like, I was so not busy at all. I don't know. I have a Young kid and I'm having another kid soon and I know I felt so busy and I know I am not busy. If I could tell 18 year old version of me, like college version of me, you think you're so busy but you actually have infinite free time. You just don't realize it. I think you'd be better off.
- [33:11]
Alan Hart
No, that's so true. I wish I could find another word. Maybe I just need to be bored because I fall into that trap too of somebody will ask how you're ah, I'm great, but I'm busy. That is not the right thing to be saying.
- [33:25]
Brian Goldfarb
It's not. And I agree. I had the same lack of word. We all say the same thing like it's busy, it's just normal. Like busy is normal, busy is. So there's this infinite more busy thing and it all falls apart. Yeah, we don't have good English language has failed us is what I would say. Alex.
- [33:40]
Alan Hart
I agree, I agree. Is there a topic either you're trying to learn more about or you think marketers need to be learning more about?
- [33:48]
Brian Goldfarb
This is trite, but it's the right answer. And it's AI broadly, full stop. There's nothing that's going to affect our business more. It's already affecting our business more. And not solar winds, but the function of marketing in so many ways that the, the. It's everywhere already. This is old day. This is old news. If you'd ask me. I remember it was. Was it Thanksgiving 23 when Chat GPT came out? No. Was it 22? I can't. I think it was 23.
- [34:19]
Alan Hart
I think it might have been 23. I can't remember either.
- [34:23]
Brian Goldfarb
It was Thanksgiving. It came out and I think it might have. Yeah, it's Thanksgiving 23. So it's been like a year. Maybe it's two years, I don't know.
- [34:32]
Alan Hart
You should Google that facts.
- [34:34]
Brian Goldfarb
Right, but the point is then you could tell it was changing the world and now it has changed our world so much. That's the area we have to learn more about. And there's. And the grift is on big time right now. And I think that's what makes it so hard, which is why you have to learn. Every single company says they're an AI company, which is bullshit. And every product has an AI thing and that changes the world. And it's like what's real and what's fake? What's actually going to change at what time frame? How does it get incorporated? What are the risks? There's so much compliance and regulatory things that are coming down now. So it's no. If you're a marketing leader and you're not thinking about this every day, you're got a problem.
- [35:14]
Alan Hart
Yeah, yeah, you're definitely going to fall behind, that's for sure. Are there any trends or subcultures that you are following, taking notice of you think other people should think about in.
- [35:25]
Brian Goldfarb
The context of this? It's not a trend or a subculture per se, but as an emerging old person, I look a lot at the generational shift that's occurring between Boomers, Xers, millennials, digital natives or Gen Ys, whatever, Gen Z and all those things that have happened. And that's to me that's. There's a fascinating interplay happening right now. And I do think marketers who are key culture leaders in their organizations have to be thinking about that because it's radically different and how that impacts thinking about how we work, how we collaborate, physical space, style, what matters and doesn't matter, what motivates and doesn't motivate. In my organization, I own internal communications and our employee brand work. That's not always in marketing, but it's always a marketing and HR partnership and therefore so is culture. And so these things. I don't think it's a meme or a subculture, but it's a fascinating meme, subculture adjacent concept that I spend a lot of time thinking about these days.
- [36:34]
Alan Hart
Yeah, you're right. It is shifting and changing. I think I have a 17 year old daughter and she thinks or anything about what she wants to major in college when that time comes and what she looks at me and what I do for work, she looks at my wife and what she does for work and she has a completely different concept of what work is or what she would work to be. Maybe is a better way to think about it.
- [36:57]
Brian Goldfarb
I think the relationship with work and so your daughter was a pandemic victim. Victim, right. So she has a completely different worldview. And I think it's been. I think it's hard when I look at people that were in high school, in college, during the pandemic. I think it's hard for people who weren't in high school and college or in the pandemic to truly understand the impact that's had on them across every dimension psychologically needs. I think we're still learning it. There's a lot of literature on this, but it's not well developed and it's going to have a huge impact as that group enters the Workforce, like the college age kids are now in the workforce and they just have totally different value systems that were heavily influenced by the pandemic. Not to say it didn't affect everybody else. Every parent I know was like ready to jump out the whip. They had kids, remote school, it was like, do I have a third story window? But it's an interesting area and it's not marketing's job. But if you think about it, we have a responsibility not just for building the company outside the building, but for building the company inside the building. And so all those things matter.
- [38:11]
Alan Hart
Marketing is definitely a, I think you said the word culture leader. It's not by itself the only culture leader. But we are putting out to the market what the company represents that needs to be authentic to who the company is. And it's also a yin and a yang. Right. That what we do outside the four walls of the company is motivating to the inside and vice versa. So totally.
- [38:35]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah. It's a two way street. Right. Because what you project externally matters, what you project internally matters. They're hyper related. I know we ran, we just did a big event in the Middle east actually and we did out of home advertising like the first time ever like in the airport in Dubai and like people's heads explode internally. I'm not convinced it moved the bar materially. Externally. Right. Like a little bit of brand awareness. But internally it was so powerful and so motivating and so exciting for everyone around the globe. Like how do you value that in that investment? You spend X dollars to do it. We did, I know we did as a company in Poland. We did. We like bought bus. They're bus ads. But they weren't buses, they were trolleys or Gotcha.
- [39:21]
Alan Hart
Yeah, yeah, trams or something.
- [39:22]
Brian Goldfarb
And I heard it was super powerful for the company when they did that a while ago. So I guess it's not the first time they've done it. But it was a very limited HR driven thing. We did a marketing driven thing. It had a huge impact. That stuff matters.
- [39:36]
Alan Hart
It does, it does. Well, last question for you. What do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?
- [39:44]
Brian Goldfarb
It's AI. It's the same thing, right. You get replaced by a robot and how do you shift your value to not be replaced by a robot? And I think that's a huge threat. I know no one wants to think about jobs are going to get taken by robots, but they are. Believe whatever hype you want. There are whole disciplines that are going to cease to exist because at some Point probably not that far from now. It won't be super needed because the robots will do a good enough job, if not better. And so I do think it's a threat to some functions that need to rethink. Think about your daughter going to college. And for the last decade, everyone wanted to be a computer scientist. If you're like, I'm going to go make money, those are the jobs I should get. I got to go. And I went to school the program. I went to Duke, and the smallest program we had was computer science. No one wanted to be in computer science. This is not our thing. And now it's the biggest program at the school.
- [40:43]
Alan Hart
Right.
- [40:44]
Brian Goldfarb
That's huge change. And so you think about the impact of AI and copilot type of things in computer science. What does that even mean? Is it really a special skill anymore? Is it hard anymore? We used to talk about 10x engineer and the 1x engineer. Like, maybe for the 10x engineer, the world's fine, but if you're not the 10x engineer, what happens to you? How much gets replaced? Like, those are the things people need to think about. I don't think anything's any different in marketing, and it's not. Tomorrow we're all looking at chatbots and conversational intelligence. And I saw a cool AI agent company that was doing sales training where you put reps in a room with a human that was not a person. It was a robot that was dressed up like a person. And they didn't know. Maybe they knew, but they couldn't really tell. And it was doing role plays better than the person. So if your job was the roleplay job, you probably don't have a job in four years. The AI agent will do it. There's a lot. It's a whole nother episode.
- [41:43]
Alan Hart
Yeah.
- [41:43]
Brian Goldfarb
But the. It is the biggest threat. It's also the biggest opportunity.
- [41:47]
Alan Hart
At the same time, when it feels. I don't know if you would agree with this, but it feels like people that are going to figure this out, like, how do I work with AI not against it? They're at least going to win in the short term, right?
- [42:01]
Brian Goldfarb
Oh, yeah. And you talk about order months or even a couple years. Absolutely. And it's tough because of regulation and compliance and fear of lawsuits and data leakage. And like, how do I not become Samsung and put all my code into the foundation model? People are scared. The pendulum swung and so there's going to be a lot of accelerated value. And then I think part of the challenge is at the very beginning you could use the words the robots wrote, but now they're all the same. So everyone's got the same. Same boring baseline unless you know how to really do a good job, which is rare. So that window came and went in whatever, 12 months, 24 months.
- [42:39]
Alan Hart
That's awesome. Brian. I want to just thank you for coming on the show. Thanksgiving 2022. So it has been two years. Two years.
- [42:47]
Brian Goldfarb
Two years that I had to go ask a robot because my brain isn't big enough.
- [42:52]
Alan Hart
We're proving that people that work with AI are going to survive. We just survived this podcast.
- [42:56]
Brian Goldfarb
Oh, it was good. That's good. The listener, maybe.
- [42:59]
Alan Hart
Brian, thank you for coming on and sharing all the conversation we have about where marketing's going, what we should be thinking about, the SEMA role and how to work with AI, not against it.
- [43:10]
Brian Goldfarb
Yeah. Awesome, Alan, thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
- [43:14]
Alan Hart
Awesome. Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Today was created and produced by me with post production support from Sam Robertson. If you're new to Marketing Today, please feel free to write us a review on itunes or your favorite listening platform. Don't forget to subscribe on marketingtodaypodcast.com Tell your friends and colleagues about the show. I love hearing from listeners. You can contact me atmarketing today podcast.com there. You'll also find complete show notes and links to what was discussed in the episode today and you can search our archives. I'm Allen Hart and this is Marketing Today.
- [43:54]
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